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One disintegrated chip at a time, I peeled away flakes of blanket. The flashlight dimmed and flickered. Nauseous, I rocked back on my heels, recovered, and ran my finger along a fractured jawbone the anatomical proportions of which had escaped from a box far older and more storied than this.
“Hey, Gramps,” I said.
Men weren’t the only monsters in my woods, after all.
chapter 11
NYCTINASTY
Though the memory had collected nearly two decades of dust and distortion, the hair on my neck rose in a cold sweat at the sight of the slack jaw and desiccated, eroded muscles.
Twenty minutes to midnight, after a peaceful evening cupping fireflies and building s’mores, Grandpa had chewed through my parents, my older and only sibling Rhetta, and my paternal grandparents. When he was in the ground I thought it was over, believed Grandma when she said my nightmares howled and clawed because children cope differently.
But now, finally, proof.
“You’re a monster,” I told his corpse.
Grandma had cleaned the crime scene. Here and there over the years I’d asked how she managed to make us disappear without a trace. She’d brush me off, saying the war had taught her, but with the sheriff’s business card lining my pocket I suspected otherwise now.
My job had been to stay quiet or parrot the lies. If I uttered a word out of place, she warned, the authorities would separate us and she would burn bright in the fires of hell before she ever allowed her family to be torn from her arms again.
Wiping my eyes on a filthy sleeve, I sat at the grave’s edge. “I can’t visit them. I don't even have pictures. Every night I light a candle and hope they aren’t forgotten in the woods rotting in cheap plywood like you.”
The older I got, the more I wanted to find their graves, but Gram took that secret to hers. Finding them wouldn’t heal me or change the past, but after years of sowing secrets and dreaming blood, I wanted so badly to replace my final memory of them with one more peaceful.
Sun-warmed headstones on a grassy hill, a seaside vista she’d scattered their ashes over, bronze plaques in a mausoleum – any outcome was better than dying and forgotten.
To her own dying day, Gram claimed she didn’t know what transpired in the workshop between Gramps and Grandpa Olexei to cause the ‘snap.’
All I knew was that there had been a fight that ended with Grandpa Olexei’s head dropped on the fly tying station over spilled beer and trout lures. He’d been ‘hacked to bits’ according to Gram.
Dad's scream had woken Rhetta and me in our room down the hall. He'd died in bed. A stab to the heart had “killed him quicker than a sneaker smashes an ant.”
Strange knives, I thought in the present hour, lifting a shriveled, padded palm and black claws.
By the time Rhetta and I had run into the hall, Mom was already there, soaked in blood from her headwrap to her thighs, holding her bedroom door closed with chemo-thinned hands.
“Mom!” I made a break for her.
“Run!” she shrieked in a pitch that stopped me cold. The door banged so hard her entire body bounced.
Rhetta dragged me screaming from the hall and into our bedroom as our mother cried for Gram. My sister dropped to her knees and tore books, toys and shoes from underneath the bunkbed.
She pointed to the cleared space. “You first.”
“I don’t wanna go first.” I backed toward the hall. “I want Mom.”
“You have to.”
“No.”
Rhetta’s brown eyes were wild with fright, but my sister had always been quick. Her attention landed on my bedspread, where Samson, the kitten Mom let us keep after grandma’s cat gave birth, stood fuzzy and hissing. Rhetta snatched him in her hands and threw him underneath.
“Now you’re second,” she said, hugging me. “Sammy’s a baby. You’ve gotta protect him how I’m gonna protect you and Mom’s gonna protect us.”
I crawled under. Samson darted for the side but I caught and held him. Rhetta cleared room for herself. I helped her with my free hand, pushing through junk we’d been too lazy to clean.
Mom’s bedroom door burst open with a resounding bang. Mom must’ve hit the wall, ground, or both, because she let out a pained grunt.
